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Hurling excrement: Ubuntu

July 25th, 2007

This week’s turd goes to Ubuntu whose bleeding edge development version (the “Gutsy Gibbon”) contains a version of GNU coreutils from over a year old. C’mon guys! You don’t have to follow upstream minute-by-minute, but running one year and a major version number behind (5.97 vs. 6.9) is just ridiculous. My beef? The pre-6 releases do not contain the “base64” utility which I really need for some KVM related stuff.

Oh, and a fart in the direction of Fedora, which still ships zsh-4.2. Admitted, 4.3 is “unstable” but it’s running fine on most other distros (see Ubuntu? Some things do get synced with upstream), and at least the Unicode stuff is fixed.

I’m cranky.

Oh, sweet symmetry!

July 7th, 2007

Nothing to say, really, but dang, it’s 7-7-7 (whether you use the drain-bamaged US notation, EU, or ISO order), so I need to write something.

Today, I’ve been trying to beat Amanda into submission. No, she’s not my wife, girlfriend, sister, daughter or dog. It’s the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. It was probably “advanced” back in 1997 when hard disks were expensive and backing up to tape made sense. Nowadays, we back up to a big array of hard disks on an off-site server. Amanda, however, is still tape-oriented, so a certain amount of hackery is involved. Fortunately, the multi-changer and “file” tape type make this not too hard. We’ve actually got that part working. Splitting up large volumes so they can be backed up in a staggered fashion wasn’t too hard either. The trickiest part is getting Amanda to recognise and use exclude lists. I think I’ve got it now.

The /etc/amanda/DailySet1/amanda.conf file contains:

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define dumptype hard-disk-tar {
    hard-disk-dump
    comment "Back up to hard disk instead of tape - using tar"
    program "GNUTAR"
    exclude list optional ".amanda.excludes"
}

And /etc/amanda/DailySet1/disklist contains:

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HOST  /var_www_html_steven             /var/www        {
        hard-disk-tar
        include "./html/steven"
    }

Obviously, tar will look for ”/var/www/.amanda.excludes”, not ”/var/www/html/steven”. My first idea was to add a line like ’exclude list “./html/steven/.amanda.excludes”’, but this article explains why that wouldn’t work (there’s already and exclude in the dumptype definition).

This leaves two options:

I chose the second approach:

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HOST  /var_www_html_steven             /var/www/html/steven        {
        hard-disk-tar
    }

Let’s wait for tomorrow’s run to see if it works…

[Update 8 July 2007]

It works!